O/T—Suggestions/Board Improvements

[Zeppy]

Time for me to throw in a suggestion...prohibit guest posts.

This has been a problem on a past board, where some felt comfortable posting attacks under the veil of annonimity.

My attitude is if you don't want to associated with the comment, perhaps you should keep it to yourself.

Just my humble opinion.

[MordEth]

Time for me to throw in a suggestion...prohibit guest posts.

I defer to John’s judgment on this; my opinion of guest posting is mixed. One thought is to make it moderated before it goes live, so any guest post would have to be approved by a moderator before it shows up on the board.

We’ve had some helpful posts from guests, and we’ve had a couple not so helpful posts from guests. So there are pros and cons to whether to allow or deny it.

But we can worry about that later; I want to talk about new features to the board, which is why I revived this thread (rather than start a new one).

Today we finally got a [youtube] tag again. Sorry that took me about 2 weeks. I’ll be writing up tutorials for all of our custom tags in the Board Tech section soon, but in the meantime, let me show you:

[ebay]350156646869[/ebay]

The output of that looks like:

eBay Item #350156646869

So you can conveniently make prettier eBay links, without having to paste long ugly eBay URLs.

The easy way to use it:

1. Copy the item number and paste it into your message.
2. Double-click the item number in your message (it will now be highlighted).
3. Click the ‘ebay’ button above the composition box, and it will stick the tags around the item number for you.

Also, as mentioned above, we got a [youtube] tag, and that is easy to use, also:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7r6vVIiG9U8[/youtube]

Note that the URL must look like the one above; if there is anything after the video ID (‘7r6vVIiG9U8’ in this case), you will want to delete that.

Most likely, if you went to the video from a channel page, the part that I am talking about removing would look like so:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7r6vVIiG9U8&feature=channel_page

So remember, delete the ampersand and anything after it.

And you can paste the URL to the YouTube video, edit if you need to do so, then highlight the URL and click the ‘youtube’ button above the composition window.

It will place the tags around the video URL.

The final product looks like:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7r6vVIiG9U8[/youtube]
And this particular video is Gennett 5363-A, “Lovey Came Back” by Bailey’s Lucky Seven. Since I was discussing it with Rocky first, I figured I may as well use a song that John and I added to his YouTube channel for Rocky, and you can see a small part of my apartment in that video.

Note that the line under the video is part of the [youtube] tag. No-one I have mentioned it to seemed aware that you could double-click an embedded video to go to it on YouTube, so it seemed wise to add that message.

I also added Google Video, but I don’t think that anyone will use it, and it is closing soon in favor of YouTube—but the videos will be up for some time, so if someone wants to embed anything from Google Video, you can.

Stay tuned for more features.

Your friendly internet daemon,

MordEth

[Neophone]

Time for me to throw in a suggestion...prohibit guest posts.

This has been a problem on a past board, where some felt comfortable posting attacks under the veil of annonimity.

My attitude is if you don't want to associated with the comment, perhaps you should keep it to yourself.

Just my humble opinion.

Zeppy,


We may end up having to go that route. I feel very strongly that we should make every effort to keep this forum as open as possible, but I understand allowances must be made.

One thing anyone who chooses to make anonymous attack posts needs to realize-we will know who they are.

If we are to thrive there can be no room for petty attacks or slights. When I said this was a fresh start I meant it. We have a chance to build an international community of like-minded collectors of BOTH talking machines and recordings. Already we have had visitors from thirteen nations across the globe:

The U.S., Australia, Germany, The Netherlands, Canada, Sweden, The U.K., The Czech Republic, Chile, France, Switzerland, Thailand and Spain.

In any group of such mixed nationalities there are bound to be different perspectives and mis-understandings, it behooves us ALL to remember that and take a moment before we type in anger, anonymous or not. (One option if one finds something they feel is questionable would be to send a PM to a moderator pointing-out the remark in question and asking the moderator to make a determination.) It is my hope we can exist with a minimum of moderation. I think we ARE on the right track....

Regards,
John

[antiquekid3]

Maybe it's just me...but it's so easy to sign up for this board...why wouldn't anyone want to do it? It's free, takes a few minutes, allows you to get private messages, etc. Some things I just wasn't meant to understand, I guess!

[ColoradoPhonograf]

I agree totally with Antiquekid. When you get a guest post you tend to want to help them get a grasp of old recordings, nurture them about all kinds of techniques to get their "old machine" going again. We all think they are collectors in the making.

In this new age world we live in 99% of that goes out the window. A guest post wants to know 3 things: What is it? Tell me all about it, and what is it worth? As a collector with a warm heart you do all of that.....and off to ebay they go to sell it. They use your information to describe it and set a reserve in your higher end price range thinking they have a treasure and you've been the sucker to do all the work for them.

Why do that? it ends up biting you in the butt. You can't meet their ebay reserve if it is a decent item. You spend an hour and a half doing research for them and I guarantee you.....you will NEVER hear from them again.

Cynical but true with the advent of internet technology.

My 2 cents....but not a penny more!

[MIA]

A guest post wants to know 3 things: What is it? Tell me all about it, and what is it worth?

I'd have to take issue with that sweeping generalization! This is only my 3rd post (I think?) and the other 2 were giving FREE information and a couple of corrections to members who were getting their phono history a bit askew.

You see, we're not all money grabbers!

[antiquekid3]

A guest post wants to know 3 things: What is it? Tell me all about it, and what is it worth?

I'd have to take issue with that sweeping generalization! This is only my 3rd post (I think?) and the other 2 were giving FREE information and a couple of corrections to members who were getting their phono history a bit askew.

You see, we're not all money grabbers!

Well, MIA...why not join the forum as a member? I just don't understand...are there downsides in your opinion?

[Brad]

Brad sent me this suggestion, and I wanted to make sure I make a note of it:

One thing I like about the board app is that when reading a thread in the bar right above the top most post on the right side there are hyperlinks for the previous and next topics. This is a nice feature that Proboards did not have. [...] It would be nice for a lazy old guy like me to have the next and previous links repeated right below the last post on the page.

I think this is a very good suggestion, and is one I fully intend to include.

— MordEth

Ping????

[MordEth]

Ping????

Brad,

I’m still getting used to how phpBB does things, but how’s that?

— MordEth

[Brad]

Ping????

Brad,

I’m still getting used to how phpBB does things, but how’s that?

— MordEth

It Works!!!!!!

Thanks, My mouse will now live longer and I will gain 1.57 minutes of free time over the remainder of my time on this planet.